


Archer's Paradox

by Aliana



Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works
Genre: Action/Adventure, Archery, Bechdel Test Pass, Dúnedain - Freeform, Gen, Hunting, Pre-modern proto-feminism, The Angle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:04:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Attempting to stave off depression and confront life's contradictions, a young Dunadan takes to the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Archer's Paradox

Autumn came, and archery helped.  Nock, draw, aim, shoot: the rhythm soothed her.  She was out of practice, and at first her shoulder ached badly.  But this pain was welcome, unlike the others.  She savored the weight of the bent string, and then the release, the lightness of having set a thing in motion.

Retrieving the arrows proved almost an equal pleasure.  With small moments of effort she freed the metal points from earth, from pine bark, darkening her fingers with dirt and sap.  She filled the quiver and started it all again.  

It was the movement that calmed her, the way her mind closed and narrowed to a point, shutting out everything else.

***

Her mother had known better than to say, You are young; you can have more.  She only clasped her daughter’s cool hands between her warm ones.  Meanwhile, the midwife set to heating rainwater so that they could wash the linens without having to parade them, bright with blood, to the river.  She added boiling water to cold in the basin, and the steam rising up felt strange in the summer heat.

It had not been entirely unexpected, as it would not have been for any other woman, even one who was strong and young—as Thorondis was.  It was not unexpected, here, where bone-snapping cold descended in winter, where the food stores ran lean more often than not, and where toil was hard for women and men alike.  There was a reason that children in the Angle were not formally given their names until they were at least a week old, even when they were born alive and crying out to the world  

This was the second one she had lost.  The first, nigh on two years ago, now, would have been a girl.  This one had not been far enough along to tell.  Small mercy, that, Thorondis thought.

It had been worse the first time.  Afterwards she had been drawn and pale for so long that, even when she’d proclaimed herself hale once more, her husband had been hesitant to try again.  

“Nonsense,” she had said, sounding braver than she felt.  She knew she would have to be brave enough for them both, now.  “Besides,” she added, “you cannot keep away from your wife forever, even if you wanted to.”  And then she’d turned to him in bed and laid siege to his doubt, until, both of them laughing, he’d been forced to concede defeat.

This time her husband was on the Road, would not return until just before the winter.  If no news from the Angle reached him on the trade routes before then—and this was always a strong possibility—he would return still carrying the cautious hope of coming home to meet his firstborn.  Instead he would find only her, alone at the hearth.

It was this thought that returned to her over and over, nagging and pulling at her like some small foundling animal.  It was this thought that, after a time, made her reach for the bow in the corner.

***

It had been her father, more often than not, who had stood beside her on the practice range. He guided her hand, gave patient correction, yanked arrows from battered straw targets and brought them back to her.  In some of the old tales, girls would learn the bow or the sword only at the yearning whims of fathers who longed for sons but hadn’t any.  Sometimes these girls would even cut their hair and array themselves as men, creep in disguise to the battle.

The Angle gave no lee for such romance.  With the Darkness encroaching and menfolk often in short supply, women were needed to see to the gates and walls, as well as to the hearth.  It had been her father who had first put the bow in her hands; it was as much a man’s duty towards his daughter as it was to see that she was fed and clothed, and to be sure that she got a good husband once she was of age.

There was a seemingly endless collection of light, well-worn practice bows circulating about the Angle.  Parents traded smaller for larger as their children grew, and passed the discarded ones along to families whose young son or daughter had reached the proper size for them.  Even though her first bow was slender and small, it had still proved unwieldy for her, as indeed the first bow did for most children.  As a girl she’d been clever and quick at many things, and her clumsiness with this new weapon set off her temper before too long.  Her father, though, was patient, picking up her bow and quiver after she’d flung them to the ground and stood sulking.  Years later she realized that he’d gallantly been trying to hide his own amusement all the while.  He persisted with her until the movements became smoother, less foreign.

It had been her father who’d taught her the elements of archery, but it had been her mother who’d taught her the secret.  Perhaps the motions were such a part of her father’s nature that he never thought of it, anymore, much less thought of teaching it to anyone else.

“Aim just to the side of the target,” her mother had told her.  “The arrow can’t go straight through the string, after all.  It needs to bend.  That’s the part that takes getting used to.”

And so Thorondis obeyed, looking just to the side of the thing she wanted to hit.  And more and more, her arrows would find their homes.

***

In the autumn it was easy enough to slip away, even by herself.  Game was coming in to season, after all.  There was meat to be had, to be cured and stored away for the frozen months.  There were hides and furs to scrape and tan.  And besides, her father’s and brother’s days were mostly taken with watch and patrol, when they were not out on the Road.  She must do her best by herself and her mother, whose hands had grown stiff and aching in the past few years—not that she ever complained of it.  

At first Thorondis went only into the outer fringes of the wood, practicing, re-learning the feel and the rhythm of archery.  Gradually she wandered further out.  She took one of her husband’s old bracers, pulled the laces tight and wound them to fit her forearm.

One day she shot a pair of small grouse, the arrow-shafts that skewered them longer than their bodies.  Their wings hung limp as she stooped and lifted them from the ground.  She brought them back to her mother’s house, where they plucked and cleaned the birds together.  Another time she shot a large lean hare, straight through its throat—she felt more than a little pleased with herself, at that.

That evening, Halbarad came to call on her.   He had been doing so every second or third day since she’d been out and about again following the misfortune, which is what you were supposed to call it in the company of men.  

She was cooking for herself, tonight, instead of taking dinner with her mother.  She asked him to stay and eat with her.  Because the autumn air was not yet too chill, and because they were young and she was otherwise alone, they sat on the front stoop with their bowls.  Wedding bands turned girls and boys to women and men, at least in name, her mother had counseled her.  Still, until one reached a certain age, a ring was no guard against wandering eyes and idle tongues.  Even with men who were good as your brother, as good as your husband’s brother.  Her mother had not said what this certain age was, but Thorondis supposed it was some shifting sum of years and children and other things that were perhaps more difficult to number.

Halbarad ate with pointed appreciation.  This was in part, she supposed, because he was kind, and in part because he was a bachelor, and more often than not away from home.  And not least  because she had learned how to season and roast wild hare so that the lean dark meat stayed tender.  The pelt, newly flayed, was airing by the hearth.

“Your own kill?” he asked her.

“Aye.”

“You take often to the woods, of late?”  It was a question, but may as well have been a statement.

“Game’s in season,” she said tersely.  Halbarad should not mind, she thought.  Even at the best of times he was laconic, and now, in her, he’d found a match for his sparseness of words.  Except for her mother, she hadn’t been speaking at length with anyone, these days.

“That it is,” he replied.  A moment passed, and then he said, “You go alone?”

She nodded.  His next impulse, she thought, would most likely be to chide her for the lack of wisdom in this, the needless risk.  There’d been some evidence of thieves and poachers about: sheep disappearing from their pastures with nary a carcass or even a drop of blood left behind.  Desperate men, most like, set on making a quick few coins in Bree or Dale.  

But to his credit, Halbarad kept any such admonition to himself.  He probably knew that she had already taken a fair measure of the danger and found it acceptable.  

He only gave a hint of a smile, and said, “Out a-wander like Aredhel, then?”

“Only a fool would wear white to the hunt.”  She had never cared for that tale.  But then she returned his half-smile, and added, “And I am no fool, Hal.”

“And I’d never take you for one,” he said.

As he was leaving, he said, “You’ll come and take a meal with Dírlas soon?  She wants to see you.  As does my mother.”

“Yes,” she replied, although she did not say when she could come, nor did Halbarad mention any particular days.  She was just as fond of Halbarad’s sister as she was of him.  Dírlas had come to see her last week.  She would have stopped by Thorondis’s house at least as often as her brother did, but a new baby kept her at home for much of the time.  

As he always did, Halbarad said, “Ask if you need anything.”

As always, she knew that he meant it.  And as always, she lied: “I will.”

***

A few days after that, she was crouched in the brush at the edge of a clearing through which a stream ran.  She fingered her bow, listened to the water, and wondered why Aredhel had ever thought to roam the forest in white; women in tales never seemed to have to do any washing.

She was content to stay there for near an hour, confident that her quarry would wander close eventually.  Her father would be proud of that; at this, at least, she had patience, if not in other things.

She was rewarded when a roe deer stepped delicately into the clearing, walked forward on slender legs, and bent its long neck to drink from the stream.  In the next moment, the doe was on its side, its front quarters in the water that washed pink about it.  Thorondis looked at the arrow shaft protruding from the hide where the animal’s neck met its shoulders, thought: _that was me_.

She was about to go and retrieve the deer, but something stayed her, and she remained in her crouch a moment more.  Perhaps it had been a sense of something else moving just beyond her sight, because a long-legged fawn appeared, then.  It followed the path the doe had taken to the stream.  Unlike the doe, however, it did not drink, but sniffed at the body of its mother.

The fawn’s eyes were large and liquid-dark.  Thorondis hesitated for a moment, but then she thought: it’s good as dead, now, anyway, and drew a bead on it.

***

She pulled the doe from the stream and went to work on it, first.  She rolled it over and pulled her arrow from its flesh, slit it from tail to breast, moving her knife like a saw where the hide was thicker.  She spilled the entrails, warm and red, out on to the grass.  She cut them away, carefully separating the heart.  Before she’d set out that day, as she always did while hunting, she’d taken her wedding ring from her finger and tucked it safely into the pouch at her belt so that grime and blood would not catch beneath it.  She knew there was a chance she’d lose it, that way, knew that she probably ought to leave it in her house.  But by now it felt strange not to have it at least on her person, even if it was not on her hand.  

When she repeated the procedure with the fawn, the blade went much more easily through the skin—she wondered what the tanner might be able to do with soft hide like this.  Both kill-shots had been clean—because of this, though the dressing was bloody, there was no foul smell to it, nor much of any sort of smell.

Although she was well, again—or so she thought—she realized she had not done this sort of work for a long time.  Bent-over work, pushing with wrists and hands.  She wiped at her forehead with the backs of her fingers, careful not to smear blood on her face.  It took her longer than she supposed it would, and by the time she was finishing with the second animal, the afternoon light had begun to change.

She stood up, considering her options.  If she wanted to take the game out of the woods, she would have to lash the carcasses and drag them behind her.  This would take some time, and might cause them damage if she tried to go too hastily; the path she had come by was very narrow, in places really no more than a thread through the brush.  She’d brought no lantern or torch-stick with her, and it was possible she’d be caught out after sunset.

That would not do, she decided.  Ever her mother’s daughter, she opted for prudence.  She would string the carcasses up and out of reach of scavengers—she’d need to do so, eventually, anyway, for curing.  She could return at first light tomorrow, remove them from the woods with daylight to spare and continue the work of preparing the meat and scraping the hides at home.

Scanning the branches above her, she settled on a sturdy-looking limb at a height to suit her purposes.  She took out her coil of rope and, after a few tries, tossed one end over the branch, dangled it back down to the ground, and began looping it around the doe’s hind legs.

It was then, as she held the coarse fibers in her hands, that she heard it.  A heavy rustle, and then a settling.  And again, this time closer.  The same sound, and then an aftermath of bent twigs and branches snapping back into place.

Her first thought was: someone else.  Another autumn hunter.  She took a breath, was about to call out in greeting, but then she heard the sound again, and something in the heaviness of it stayed her voice.  She let go of the rope end and wiped her hands on the front of her dress, uncaring of the blood.  She thought not of hunters, then, but of ragged thieves weighed down with sacks, poached sheep slung over their shoulders.

The light was dying and the noise was coming closer.  She retrieved her bow from where she’d set it on the ground; her quiver was still on her back.  With slow unthinking steps she shrank back from the clearing and into the brush—into the spot she’d crouched waiting for her game to appear.  Even as she did this, a clear voice in her mind said, _All for naught.  How foolish you’ll feel when you see it’s only another hunter_.  But something else, something more raw and urgent in her stomach, overruled the clear voice and bade her stay where she was.  She obeyed.

As she sat on her heels and tried to steady her breathing, something else did indeed enter the clearing.  It was not a man.

Its shape could have been a blatant mockery of the slender-legged doe.  It loomed, heavy-armed, slightly stooped in the shoulders—or, what would have been its shoulders, had it been a man.  Its breath was slow and heavy, sounded almost labored, and its skin was a mottled grey, the color of a beast that did not often see sunlight.  Its head looked small atop its ill-balanced hulk of a body.

Thorondis caught her breath.  She had never seen one in the flesh, before, but she had heard the stories and she knew that this could only be a troll.  Arador’s bane.  But she had never recalled anyone telling of them this close to the Angle; perhaps the darkness was coming closer, sooner than anyone might have expected.  Perhaps—

The troll stooped, sniffed at the doe carcass that still lay on the ground.  Poked at it with a scaly, clawed hand.  Seemed to consider the rope that still hung over the tree branch, then looked at the carcass again, and also that of the fawn.  A shard of indignation pierced Thorondis’s alarm—hateful creature, indeed, to think of taking what rightfully belonged to another.

It will leave, though, she thought, trying to let go of her anger over the deer.   _It will leave, stomp its way back from whence it came, and then I’ll happily run back to the village with my life, and tell—_

Her right calf stiffened with cramp, then.  Caught by the suddenness of the pain, she leaned forward slightly, catching her weight on the heels of her hands.  

Dry brush crackled beneath her.  She looked up to find a pair of murky yellow eyes, sunk deep in a pinched grey face, fixed upon her.  

She made an involuntary noise in her throat, stumbled backwards.  The thing—the troll—advanced toward her in the same heavy ungraceful gait with which it had entered the clearing.

“I—I mean no harm,” she said, her wits returning, even as she reached back over her shoulder for an arrow.  In some of the tales she’d heard, trolls understood the common speech.

If this one understood, it gave no sign, only made a hideous, hoarse groan of an utterance and kept coming closer.  She stood her ground, nocked the arrow she’d grabbed, and loosed it.

It found its mark, and the troll roared, but only paused for a moment.  She caught a glimpse of sharp jagged teeth.  The arrow had flown straight and embedded itself in the beast’s breast, but the troll simply plucked it out and tossed it aside as if it had been a sewing needle.  And why not?  The tales also said that trolls had thick hide, tough as tanned leather.  And Thorondis’s bow was a hunting-bow, with arrows to match.  They could fell all but the largest of game animals easily, but troll-skin was quite another matter.  Behind her ribs, her heart was beating violently.  Her throat had gone dry.

In less than a second, choices flashed through her mind.  She could turn back into the woods and run—but the trail from which she’d come was on the other side of the stream, and she could not remember what paths, if any, ran from this side of the clearing.  She imagined herself trapped by impassible meshes of roots and brambles, and a giant shadow falling over her, reaching for her.  Trolls, the tales also went, ate anything and everything.

No.  If she fled, it would have to be in the other direction.  

And then a scaly, clawed hand, near the same size as the whole of her, it seemed, was darting towards her.  She took another step back into the brush, nocking a second arrow at the same time.  This second arrow struck at the troll’s breast, again, near to where her first had hit.  In the moment that it took to grasp the shaft and yank the point free of its skin, Thorondis had already pulled herself up to a low tree limb.  The troll was still breathing its horrible thick breaths, a bit faster now than when it had entered the clearing.  It took another swipe at her, but just missed as she scrambled up to the next-nearest branch that she judged might support her, and then the next.  The troll grasped at the branch she’d just vacated, pulled it down and snapped it from the trunk like a twig.

She only stopped and looked down when she’d pulled herself up as high as she’d judged she could, gasping for air, palms raw and bleeding from where she’d grasped tight at the bark.  It was an old tree, and a tall one.  It was also the tree, she realized with a twinge of irony, from which she’d intended to hang the deer carcasses.  Her rope still hung over one of the lower limbs.  As soon as she looked down, she wished she had not, for height and panic conspired to make her dizzy.  The early evening air was crisp and cool, but she could feel herself sweating through her clothes.  She was at least twenty feet off the ground, she thought—perhaps thirty.

The troll was a grey mass below her, and she wondered what she had gotten herself into.  She might as well be a squirrel treed by a hound, she thought.  What had she been thinking?  She ought to have dodged around the troll, dashed across the stream and to the other side of the clearing.  At any rate, she was here, now, and it was too late for that.  

She still had her quiver, and she’d slung her bow around her body, the string crossed over her chest.  She could rain down arrows on the beast—she still had quite a few—but they might do no more damage than her first two had done, especially now that she would not be able to aim so well from this distance.  And then what would she do when she ran out?  Was the thing bent on her, now?  Would it skulk about the clearing, waiting for her, or would it take the carcasses and go back to wherever its lair was?  She’d heard that certain breeds of trolls turned to stone, come daylight—was this one of those?  Perhaps not, since it had been lumbering about at dusk—

The tree shook.  Hard.  She caught her breath, clung to rough bark.  Somewhere far beneath her, the troll was making more noises, hard coarse exhalations that seemed to issue from the back of its throat.

She held on, and for a moment she thought of the absurdity of this.  To be shaken loose from a tree—what an odd death that would be.  She thought of her husband.  Her father and her mother.  Most likely the troll would carry her off and devour her with wet yellow teeth, just as it undoubtedly wished to devour the deer she’d just shot; no one would know what had become of her, and poor Hal would curse himself for the rest of his days for not warning her against venturing out alone…

The sky was shading to a dark blue, and she thought she could hear her own heart beating.  Then there was a creaking noise, so distinct that for a moment she thought it must be a dry-hinged door opening.  And then the earth spun and she was falling.

***

Something hit her, something very large and very unforgiving.  It took her a couple of moments to realize that this something was the ground.  She stared through a tangle of branches, unable to move.  She could taste blood in her mouth.

She gazed numbly down the length of the tree, saw roots that had been wrested from the grip of the earth.  Then she realized that she was very cold, and that her clothes were wet.  The tree had toppled and fallen across the width of the clearing, the topmost limbs, where she sat, coming to rest in the stream.  For a few moments the only sound she could hear was her own breathing, ragged and harsh.

The thing was coming towards her.  The troll.  She could hear it.  She laid a hand over her chest, felt the string still stretched taut across her body.  She pulled the arc of her bow up and over her head, miraculously intact.  She sat up, reached over her shoulder for another arrow.  For a sickening moment her hand grasped at air and she thought her quiver was empty, all the arrows scattered and gone.  But then her fingers brushed fletching-feathers.  She had a few left, after the fall.  Four, maybe five.

It was nearly upon her.  Her hands were cold and stiff, but she managed to nock an arrow, press the bow forward.  The point went in to the troll’s neck, this time; a killing shot for a man or for any other beast, surely, but again the troll simply yanked it out with a roar.

Absurdly, then, the old tales rushed into her mind again.  The unfairness of them, and the untruth.  Women in tales were always beautiful silvery creatures, and when they defeated their foes, they did so nimbly.  With tricks, with spells and songs, dancing in moonlit glades, waiting to be discovered.  And they wore white, and never had to do any washing.  And they certainly never bled for days, nor did they spend the first three years of their marriage getting, then losing, children before they were born, gritting their teeth in pain.

She took a deep breath, willed herself back to this moment, to what was real.  She thought of what she had just seen.  How, here from below, in the fading light, the inside of the troll’s mouth was shockingly pink against the grey of its skin and yellow of its teeth when it roared.

Her next shot hit the troll’s broad shoulder, and to her relief it stepped back one clumsy pace.  The arrow after that, however, flew wide of its mark, past the side of its head.  It staggered closer again.

All the old tales fled from her mind, and all that was left was what her mother had said to her many years ago.  About how even the stiffest of arrows must bend around the bowstring.  How the good archer looks just to the side of the thing she wants to hit.

She had only a few arrows left.  Her arms and hands ached.  She loosed another arrow, nocked the next just a heartbeat after.  The first one went into the troll’s thick grey throat, again.  And when it opened its mouth, bleated in rage, she was already taking aim.

The arrow struck the tender back of its throat when its mouth was open, the shaft protruding from between sharp jagged teeth.  This time, its roar was especially terrible, edged with a wet, gurgling noise.  It was choking.  Dark blood ran over its lips, and it staggered and fell backwards with a heavy thud.

Thorondis, breathing hard, hands and feet close to numb, pulled herself up from the mud.  She waited for the thing to raise itself up again, but it did not.  

She came home spotted with blood that was far too black to belong to the likes of any ordinary man or beast.

***

Even after that, she would not be kept abed; she’d already had far too much of that, lately, she said.

Even so, she could not deny that she was tired.  The next morning, while Halbarad and the young chieftain and some of the other men went out to the clearing to investigate, one of the healers visited her at her house, to assure her that the scrapes and bruises and sprains were nothing too serious.

“Lucky girl, you are,” the healer told her, “if you’d fallen half as far as you said you did.”

Yes, Thorondis agreed.  Lucky girl.

The healer bundled up her bandages and herbs and took her leave.  Much later, Hal came to see her, as he’d promised he would.  This time their young chieftain came with him.  As they knocked on her door, a couple of the other men stood in her yard, hanging from one of the trees the carcasses of the doe and the fawn they’d brought from the clearing.  If nothing else, she’d still have venison this autumn.

The troll had been where she’d left it when she fled, Halbarad and Aragorn told her.  However, it lay on its face instead of on its back, the posture in which she’d last seen it.  It may have managed to drag itself upright, afterwards, stagger a few heavy paces before falling again, this time for good.

That hadn’t been all.  The tracks showing the route by which the troll had come to the clearing were still there, in the morning.  The men had followed them to a dark den lined with rotting leaves.  Inside they’d found the mother-troll’s sickly brood, pale grey and half blind, mewling, and gnashing teeth that were already sharp.

“They gave us much less trouble than yours did,” Halbarad said.  He smiled at her, took her hand in his.

Aragorn also smiled for a moment, wanly, but then his expression faded to a look so blank it was impossible to read.  Thorondis thought she knew what this was about; Hal must have, as well.  Yet another encroachment.  Another place where shadows were falling too close to home, where the dark was closing in.  And that would mean more arms, more caution and more sleepless nights.

All of this may have been part of the weight in his voice as he lifted a heavy, notched blade, held it out to Thorondis.  They’d found it in the den, he told her.  Weapon of the enemy.  Rightfully hers, now.

And without any irony, he added, “You can tell this to your children.”

She took the blade from him.  “I will, sir.”

***

And she did.

**Author's Note:**

> I did the random-pointing-to-indices thing for [this challenge](http://aliana1.livejournal.com/104156.html), and of course I got "Trolls." Non-randomly added to the mix is Thorondis, created by Dwimordene. Some of you may recognize her as the wife of Eledhril the intermittently faithful Ranger (Thorondis, that is, not Dwim). I just now realized that Eledhril appears in three stories by two authors (not counting meta comment fic), and he manages to get laid in each one. With a different person each time. I'm pretty sure Thorondis was long overdue for a story without him in it.
> 
> I tried archery once, when I was eight, at summer camp. It did not go so well. Therefore I am grateful to Wikipedia for informing me about the Archer's Paradox and the basic mechanics of archery. Also thanks to the random hunter guys on YouTube who showed me how to field dress a deer. Guys, I seriously don't know how I would write anything, ever, without the internet.


End file.
